A Trump-appointed judge has ruled that the President has to give Jim Acosta his White House press pass back, and based his ruling on an only partly-related due process precedent instead of plain common sense. That’s apparently a lawyer thing, to search for precedent first. I object, but I don’t count either. My precedent goes back to the First Amendment’s statement that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press. When the First Amendment was ratified in 1791, “the press” referred to the printing press. There were no reporters and there was certainly no press gaggle. In larger towns there was a town crier, and the amendment said that printers could print whatever they chose without government approval or interference. I am clearly not a lawyer, but the Constitution was devised to protect the people from an overbearing government, not the other way around.

There was no White House, the White house was built between 1792 and 1800. So I would contend that the term “the press” doesn’t include reporters at all. The first “press conference” occurred during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency by accident. He apparently said some things to reporters which were then printed, and he liked that and decided to do it again. “Press Conferences” have been different for different presidents since then, with each president deciding how to handle them. And different presidents had different relationships with the press as well– friendly, or not so much.

Rolling Stone 8/04/14: “The White House Distrusts the Media, Reporters Feel Persecuted – a former Obama Spokesman on the history of the toxic relationship” (The wonderful illustration by Victor Juhaz accompanied this article)

Those of you who are following the dreadful story of the California wildfires might be interested in Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire.Norman Maclean (1902-1990) grew up in the Western Rocky Mountains of Montana. He worked for many years in logging camps and for the U.S. Forest Service before he began his academic career. He is the author of A River Runs Through It and Other Stories which he completed after his retirement from the University of Chicago in 1973.

On August 5, 1949, a crew of fifteen Smoke-jumpers, the U.S. Forest Service’s elite airborne firefighters, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Less than two hours after their jump, all but three of these men were dead or fatally burned. Exactly what happened in Mann Gulch that day has been obscured by years of grief and controversy.

Norman Maclean first saw the Mann Gulch fire as it still burned in mid August 1949, and even then he knew he would one day become part of its story. Maclean spent the last fourteen years of his life studying and reliving the fire.Young Men and Fire is a story of Montana, of the ways of wildfires, firefighters and fire scientists, and especially of crew, young and proud, who”hadn’t learned to count the odds and to sense they might owe the universe a tragedy”. The story is also Maclean’s own, the story of a writer obsessed by a strange and human horror, unable to let the truth die with these young men.

The smokejumpers in Mann Gulch are trapped by a “blowup” a deadly explosion of flame and wind rarely encountered and little understood at the time.

A River Runs Through It is also very special. Maclean begins “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.”

The Black Death: 1348-1350, was an amalgam of three diseases: Bubonic plague, septicemic plague, and pulmonary plague. The first two came from fleas carried by black rats, the third was an airborne variant. Cautious estimates: 1/3 of the population of Europe perished. About 1.4 million – 2 million in England, 8 million in France, 30 million in Europe as a whole.

This was a decisive point in the decline of the European feudal system. By 1230 the English population was 6 million. Not until the mid-18th century did population reach this number again.

“There are strange things done in the midnight sun:” The Inuit are complaining that there are too many polar bears in Nunavut, and climate change hasn’t yet affected any of them, or so says a draft management plan from the Canadian territorial government that contradicts conventional scientific thinking.

The proposed plan says that growing bear numbers are increasingly jeopardizing public safety, and it’s high time that Inuit knowledge drove management policy instead of the other way around. We have the bureaucracy problem down here too. Bureaucrats safe in comfortable offices far away from the specifics they are regulating don’t respect local knowledge. Rather like Hillary, referring to a majority of the people in the center of the country as “deplorables”—bureaucrats are apt to think they have more degrees and are thus smarter than the locals they are regulating. Polar bears killed two Inuit last summer.

The plan leans heavily on Inuit knowledge, which yields population estimates higher than those suggested by western science for almost all of the 13 included bear populations.

Scientists say only one population of bears is growing; Inuit say there are nine. Environment Canada says four populations are shrinking; Inuit say none are.

The proposed plan downplays one of the scientific community’s main concerns.

“Although there is growing scientific evidence linking the impacts of climate change to reduced body condition of bears and projections of population declines, no declines have currently been attributed to climate change,” it says. “(Inuit knowledge) acknowledges that polar bears are exposed to the effects of climate change, but suggests that they are adaptable.”

Susan Crockford is the wildlife biologist who is expert on polar bears and issues an annual report. Her 2017 report is here.

The environmental activists who run around in polar bear suits at venues where they can expect press attention can’t be bothered to study up on the polar bear situation, nor can the mainstream media. Nor, apparently does Tom Steyer, billionaire climate activist and true believer who is running around the country trying to convince people about the “need to impeach” President Trump for denying imminent global warming. It has been a warm year in Central Europe so far this year, but it is not due to global warming, the globe has been cooling off, or at least not warming at all. This is the third year in a row that the globe has cooled off from it’s El Nino high in 2015. Arctic ice has stabilized over the past 10 years and this year the Northwest Passage was closed the entire year. The Hudson Bay freeze up has come earlier than average. They even had snow in Texas. There are currently fewer sunspots on the sun.

A Max Planck Institute Climate Modeler has said that we have a 10 year reprieve, earlier climate models were too sensitive. And so it goes. Panic and reprieve. Facts are so troublesome.

Mark Morano of Climate Depot has a Facebook video about his recent book debunking the climate alarmists like Al Gore and Tom Steyer.

CNN is suing President Trump or the White House or something because they took away poor Jim Acosta’s press pass. The grounds seem to be the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. The First Ten Amendments were ratified on December 15, 1791. I would suggest that when they spoke of “the press” in 1791, they were talking about the printing press and what could be printed. There was, at that time, no gaggle of reporters shouting questions at the President of the United States. More likely there was a town crier who disseminated the news, such as it was. But then I am not a lawyer.

Precisely no one actually thinks that Acosta is a good news journalist. He might be good entertainment, for some, but he doesn’t break news or accurately report it. He’s a pundit who loves to offer his opinions all day, every day.

Even among his colleagues he’s known as a preener rather than a reporter. He doesn’t break stories or dig into facts. He preens on camera and does it in a way that makes it harder for legitimate press corps members to hold the administration accountable .

Every second that Acosta uses to preen and whine at a press conference is a second that a real journalist can’t use to ask questions or elicit information the American people need to know about. His behavior doesn’t just damage his own reputation, it hurts CNN’s and the entire journalism profession.

His behavior last week crossed a line when he physically refused a young female intern attempting to provide the White House microphone to another reporter. He then doubled down and falsely claimed without evidence that he didn’t touch her. In fact, video evidence showing he did touch her is incontrovertible.

Ouch! Then at Commentary, John Steele Gordon takes on another Acosta display of ignorance. Jim Acosta did not approve of the President’s new immigration proposal.

Acosta essentially made two points: One was that the proposed legislation that Miller was defending did not square with the poem by Emma Lazarus (“give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”). Miller pointed out that, great as the poem is, it is not part of the Constitution. Furthermore, the circumstances of 1883, when it was written, are perhaps no longer pertinent in the early 21st century and we might need new legislation to deal with that reality.

Acosta’s other point was that the legislation would require immigrants to know English before they could get a green card. He apparently didn’t know that current law requires the very same thing. He could have looked it up in a few seconds on Wikipedia, but, as Jim Vlasto said, political reporters tend to be lazy. Acosta then said that that requirement would mean that only immigrants from Britain and Australia could get in. Perhaps he’s never heard of Canada, where practically all its 35 million citizens, including French Canadians, can speak English.

While Mandarin Chinese has the most native speakers, with around 900 million, English is third with about 371 million. But Mandarin is spoken almost entirely in Northern China. English is either the official or an official language in no fewer than 52 different countries around the world. The sun may have set on the British Empire, but the sun never sets on the English language.